Steroidal compounds with estrogenic activity have found long-standing utility in the treatment of a variety of medical indications and in regimes for contraceptive purposes. Despite the long history of the field there still is a need for more effective, safer and more economical compounds than the existing ones. This need is the more pressing in view of advancement in health care in other areas, which has led to an increasingly longer life span. This is in particular a problem for women for whom the decline in estrogenic hormones at menopause is drastic and has negative consequences for bone strength and cardiovascular functions. For estrogenic treatment, there are highly active estrogenic 16α-substituted estragenic steroids available as for example described in Fevig et al (in Steroids 51: PP 471-497, 1988), DE 2757157, U.S. Pat. No. 3,704,253 and Takikawa et al (in Res. Steroids Vol 7, pp 291-299, 1977). Also 7α,11β-disubstituted estrogens are known from Tedesco et al (in Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters, Vol 7, No 22, pp 2919-2924, 1997), but further improvements are still possible in this field. The discovery of subtypes of estrogen receptors, there being an α-subtype (ER α) and a β-subtype (ER β) of such receptors, offers the possibility for more selective activation of one particular subtype of those two receptors, immanently resulting in more effective treatments or treatments with less side effects. Specifically 16β-methyl-estrogens are described in González et al (Steroids Vol. 40; 171-187; 1982), but compounds with the 16β-configuration do not generally have the favourable selective effect of a compound of this invention.